FOOTPRINTS OF FAMOUS AMERICANS IN PARIS BY JOHN JOSEPH CONWAY, M. A. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MRS. JOHN LANE AND 32 ILLUSTRATIONS UN ON JOHN LANK TUB HODLET HEAD NEW YORK JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXO . r. i -m TO MY MFIM, ONC PRIKND COLONEL HENRY WATTERSON DBAN OF AMERICAN JOURNALISTS NOBUKST SONT OF THE XWITKD NORTH AND SOUTH TH ROOK K AFKKCT10N ATK1Y UKDICATKI INTRODUCTION THERE was a very distinguished American wit whose contribution to the sum of his nations achievement consisted in one sentence which has become historical. Good Americans, said Tom Appleton, Cf when they die go to Paris Tom Appleton so called among his intimates was the Sydney Smith of the Boston society of his day, a big, round-shouldered man with heavy, sombre eyes behind which his audacious humour lay in ambush and enlivened the transcendental seriousness of the Huston of that time. Being only an amateur humorist, he nearly achieved the signal honour of being forgotten m the immortality of liis epigram, and it is due to the genial Autocrat of the Breakfast Table that the name of the man who made a complete character study of his countrymen in eight words lias not been forgotten For, indeed, the end and aim of most Americans for more than a century, whether they could afford it or not, was to go to Paris Of course, in postponing the time of their visit Tom Appleton exaggerated, as, indeed, all wits do Still, it was only to point the national aspiration more trenchantly For it is not too much to say that in those dayn the stay-at-home Americans were homesick for a sight of the city they had never seen xi xii FAMOUS AMERICANS IN PARIS Fm going to Paris was the exultant boast. Never to London For London was a duty, butParis was a joy. Paris lured them by its traditions of friendship, by the promise of a life of which hitherto they had had no conception, and by the lavish generosity with which it shared its treasures of science, art and beauty with all strangers within its gates. So, undaunted by an unknown tongue, by racial and religious differ ences, and by a totally different outlook on life, they succumbed to the spell under which the most rigid of New England Puritans discovered, possibly for the first time, the foic tic viwc. Strict ladies, from the most godly of New England country towns, became so disloyal to their ice-water principles ts to drink claret, excusing this awful backsliding by the mercifully impure condition of the water, whiU many a blameless Presbyterian wan so falsa to hi tipln inking as to go to a theatre on a Sunday when, had he bam at home, he wottld have gone to mcetiji. Such was the lure of Paris. Besides, the language, which most of them did not understand, has always, like charity, tuvemJ a multitude of indiscretions. While Paris overflowed with indescribable charm, the dreariness of London of those days, on the other hand, was only the ordinary characteristic of most American towns, exaggerated in the case of London because of its unwieldy ise. Indeed, for many decades the American, sensitive to fogs and cold shoulders, fled from London to Parts, unaware that under the national frost was hidden ashy, friendly soul struggling with an historic inability to be INTRODUCTION xiii anything hut frigid. But that has long since changed, for between the sixties and seventies of the last century America discovered what was nearly as important as the discovery of America byColumbus, and that was London. And it is but doing justice to the genius whose centenary the world celebrates now, to acknowledge that it is entirely due to Charles Dickens that this amazing discovery was ever made. For from that time on the Amciican went on pilgrimages to London, not so much to study the London of history as the London of Charles Dickens, who had touched its dull streets with the glamour of his genius and filled thorn with life. From that time hey came to England to see. the places in which the creatures of his fancy had lived…